Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday August 13, 2011 @02:55PM
from the some-of-which-are-really-government-evil dept.

schwit1 writes "Recently a number of ISPs have been caught improperly redirecting end-user traffic in order to generate affiliate payments, using a system from Paxfire. A class action lawsuit has been filed against Paxfire and one of the ISPs. This is a serious allegation, but it's the tip of the iceberg. I'm not sure if everyone understands the levels of sneakiness that service providers can engage in."

I'm on Charter and I've most definitely been randomly redirected to Charter's internal search page for no good reason. The last example of this I definitely remember is when I tried to visit www.gimp.org and instead I was sent to Charter's search page. Charter's search then displayed www.gimp.org as one of the search results. When I clicked on the search result I was sent to www.gimp.org without any further issues. This tells me there is no technical difficulty at all, it's just a corrupt tactic being used by Charter to try to milk their customers (as if they need even more profits, as being being a one of the companies in a duopoly is just not good enough for them).

Are people somehow missing the point??? The article was written by the CEO of an ISP that is NOT doing those things (they're also not doing usage caps, which people would discover if they read the other blog posts -- see Mar 23).

(Disclaimer: they're also my ISP. They're amazingly clueful, and will even give their subscribers a limited shell account, although you do have to ask for it. It's great for an ssh web proxy, to help prevent hijackings at public wifi access points. )

That's immunity from charges that they cooperated with government spying without a warrant.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with "redirecting end-user traffic in order to generate affiliate payments". The government is not involved in that, did not ask the ISPs to do that, and offers no immunity to prosecution from that.

People seem to forget that the web isn't just HTTP, and there are quite a few other things that do DNS lookups. And weird stuff happens when a name that doesn't exist resolves, and the connection is directed to an ad server.

There's a more permanent fix... set your router to use Google's open DNS servers... Google is helping to redefine evil, but at least their DNS servers actually conform to standards and don't engage in these kinds of shenanigans.

The problem with that approach is that the network (at least the "last mile" leading to customers' residences) is a natural monopoly. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly [wikipedia.org] for a definition. For a competitor, it is usually not worthwhile to build a parallel network if he can reach only a few customers. Result: The incumbent ISP can like a fuckhead and get away with it.

A way to solve that would be a public network where the customer can choose his provider and the provider can then rent the wire from the customer's house to the next telephone exchange. Germany got that one halfway right:When the telecommunications branch of the former Deutsche Post (public mail and telecom authority) was privatized, the new company "Deutsche Telekom" also got the network - under the condition that they rent out the "last mile" to competitors if the customer wants to go with one of those. A new regulation authority controls the price for that rent.As a result, Germany actually has DSL competition in most places. Of course, there is still a lot of bickering between Deutsche Telekom and the competition about how much rent is fair, and the regulation authority is needed to keep the Deutsche Telekom from charging excessive rates. But by and large it works.